Did those stories turn out to be worth fifteen thousand dollars to the Star-Bulletin?
Search me.
But R. J.'s not the sort of guy who takes being diddled around with lying down, and I'd been authorized by the panicky board room crowd to negotiate him back into the fold at any cost—if he succeeded. A check for five thousand made out to Carr Investigations and Security was what he demanded first, plus one just like it for Martin Knox as a reward, and a final five thousand dollar check to Dumpster Diver Tommy, the finder of the shoes—the whole thing being otherwise known as the R. J. Carr sucker-of-the-year routine, you might say.
Yours truly, of course, would have heard plenty about it later on if he hadn't added a fourth article to that front page, just a squib, promoting the generosity of the editors in providing the two additional “rewards."
How does that poem go? “If you can keep your head when all about you ...?” You keep your head and you keep your job, even if it usually is Chief Babysitter to the Star-Tribune editorial board.
Copyright © 2009 S. L. Franklin
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: SOLUTION TO THE MYSTERIOUS CIPHER
Don't worry. I gave the chap a crack on the head with a bottle. Laid him out properly. God knows what he wanted to do to the kid.—Georges Simenon
From “A Matter of Life and Death"(1952)
xyzbcg lifeandth jkmopqrsuvw
ABCDEF GHIJKLMNO PQRSTUVWXYZ
[Back to Table of Contents]
Linda Landrigan: Editor
Laurel Fantauzzo: Assistant Editor
Susan Mangan: Executive Director, Art and Production
Carole Dixon: Senior Production Manager
Evira Matos: Production Associate
Victoria Green: Senior Art Director
Irene Lee: Production Artist/Graphic Designer
Abigail Browning: Manager, Subsidiary Rights and Marketing
Bruce W. Sherbow: Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Sandy Marlowe: Circulation Services
Julia McEvoy: Manager, Advertising Sales
Connie Goon: Advertising Sales Coordinator
Peter Kanter: Publisher
www.TheMysteryPlace.com
[Back to Table of Contents]
Mystery Classic: INSURANCE by Fletcher Flora, selected and introduced by Loren D. Estleman
Flora Obscura
The 1950s struck America like the A-bomb, wiping out almost everything that had defined it throughout the first half of the twentieth century. TV invaded the parlor, superhighways swept away the country store and replaced it with burger chains, and corporate automatons filled the vacuum left by the industrial patrarchs of the early 1900s. James Dean invented the teenager. The fallout from this cultural Ground Zero destroyed dozens of promising writing careers. Fletcher Flora was a casualty.
World War II restrictions on paper consumption had ended the thirty-year reign of the pulps, that vast repository of fast-paced, bare-knuckled prose wrapped in gaudy covers that outraged decency groups and incidentally provided America's only native contribution to world literature. When they resurfaced under Eisenhower, they were half their original size and cost more than twice as much, and could not compete with the ubiquity of television and that other notorious corruptor of youth, the comic book. (For contemporary relevancy, insert “video game.")
Much has been written about Black Mask, Dime Detective, and The Shadow, but little about the digest-size publications that sprang up like suckers on their mighty stumps and withered soon after. You rarely see Manhunt, Menace, or The Saint Detective Magazine represented in pulp fiction anthologies, yet the work of their most obscure talents equals and sometimes surpasses their famous predecessors'. Fletcher Flora held his own against the best. Sadly, he's as forgotten as the worst.
According to Bill Pronzini, pulp historian and tough-guy writer well known to these pages, Flora was born in Kansas in 1914 and died there in 1969, shortly after completing his last novel. He graduated Kansas State College, served with the 32nd Infantry Division in World War II, married, had three children, and published approximately a hundred and fifty stories and sixteen novels. It seems inconceivable that so large a body of work is out of print.
That situation stands corrected.
"Insurance” employs a style and themes made popular by Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain, but they're abused often by hacks who lack the imagination to invent their own. It's a brutal, tightly crafted story without an extraneous word (today's best-selling writers, please take note), and with a disturbing twist; but these have never been in short supply in crime fiction. Its premise, which might have seemed far-fetched in 1955, appears psychic in the light of recent real-life events; but we've all been burned by the phrase “ripped from the headlines.” Its success depends upon none of these things.
Simply (if maddeningly) put, Flora's secret is a combination of self-confidence, unself-consciousness, and a knack for bringing dead language to life that some have called the divine spark, others magic. It was a rare gift when paper was scarce, and even more precious now that so many trees have sacrificed themselves for so little substance.
I'm privileged to present Fletcher Flora for fresh consideration. This time, let's try not to let him slip away.
* * * *
INSURANCE by Fletcher Flora
He rented this shack down the beach, and he lived there over a year. Very few people paid any attention to him. He told the man who rented him the shack that he was a writer looking for seclusion, and the word got around. He'd grown a beard for the part, and he'd even bought a second-hand typewriter to substantiate it.
The first six months were easy, because he didn't expect anything to happen then. Afterward, it kept getting harder. Tension mounted as the days passed, and he walked down the beach to the town to meet all ships from the States. When a year had elapsed, he began to think that Ella was never coming, and he lay on the beach during the days and in the shack at night, cursing himself for a fool for ever having believed that she would follow him according to their plan, and then she finally came. It was exactly one year, six weeks and three days from the time of his own arrival.
She came in from the ship and walked right past him on the pier. He could have reached out and touched her, and he wanted like hell to do it, but he didn't. Her eyes flicked over him and away without any signs of recognition, and he turned and followed her up across the beach to the hotel. She was wearing a white sharkskin dress that fit her like a glove, and the bright light of the sun made a pale fire of her hair. He'd never been so glad to see anyone in his life. It's hard to keep an image clear and focused in the mind, and even in so little time he'd forgotten how beautiful she was. His stomach was like a clenched fist all the way to the hotel.
In the lobby, she registered and went up in the elevator, and he crossed over into the bar and crawled onto a stool. He ordered a daiquiri and sat there sipping it, the taste and touch of the rum and citrus juices cold and tart on his tongue. During the past year, he hadn't thought much about the murder itself, only about whether Ella would ever come or not, but now, waiting for her in the final minutes of his waiting, it came back into his mind in detail.
They had this place outside the city that Ella had inherited. It was really a farm, but they didn't do any farming. Not Ella and him. They liked their green stuff to come faster and easier than you could get it out of the ground. They had a few grand, and they wondered how to make it grow, and finally they decided it would be a good thing to invest it in an insurance policy on a dead man. Double indemnity, of course. They paid for twenty-five and planned to collect fifty. On him. He was the dead man. The insurance outfit didn't know that, of course. They had him examined, and the doctor signed a paper that said he was alive. Only Ella and he knew that he wasn't. For practical purposes, that is.
He kept looking for a guy who would do. He wanted someone in a hurry, because there wasn't any sense in sinking too much in premiums. Finally, the guy just stumbled i
nto the setup and practically asked to be used. He was in the city when this guy came, and when he got back that evening, a cold evening in January, Ella met him out by the barn where he'd put the car.
"He's here,” she said. “A young guy on the tramp. He asked for food and he wants to sleep in the barn. About your height and weight and age. He's perfect."
"How about his teeth?"
"No work on them at all. Just like yours. I told him you were in town to the dentist, and he said he'd been lucky. Said he'd never been to a dentist in his life."
"Neither have I. You're smart, honey. Beautiful and smart. Where is this guy?"
"In the kitchen eating."
"Okay. I'll go look at him."
She moved in against him, and the breath of her whisper was hot on his face. “Tonight, Steve. Make it tonight."
They lost time, the way they always lost time when she came at him like that, but after a while he went up to the house and into the kitchen where the young drifter was sitting.
Like Ella said, he was perfect. Steve told him it was okay to sleep in the barn, and when he'd finished eating, he took him down there. Inside the barn, in the darkness, it was easy to slip a leather strap around the drifter's neck, but it was a lot harder to hang on when the guy understood what he'd walked into. He threshed like a maniac and tried to twist around to get at Steve with his hands, but he couldn't keep it up long with the strap cutting into his throat, and pretty soon he was dead.
Steve improvised some braces and managed to prop the body upright in the opening of the stall where Reuben was kept. Reuben was a horse, a vicious devil, a fine killer. Steve went into the adjoining stall and, reaching over the partition, rammed him brutally in the flank with the handle of a fork. The horse lashed out with his hind legs, and one hoof caught the body of the drifter in the chest. The body was hurtled all the way across the central aisle of the barn. It smashed against the planking on the other side and bounced half way back before it hit the ground. Steve left it lying there and returned to the house.
Ella was waiting in the kitchen. She had a bag already packed and sitting on the linoleum by the door. Her cheeks were hot, and her eyes were bright with excitement. She looked as if she were burning up inside with a high fever. It made her more beautiful than ever. God, she was beautiful.
"Okay,” he said. “It's done."
"You'd better get away, Steve. You'd better start the fire and leave."
He took her by the shoulders and let his hands slip in upon her throat. “Don't forget to come, honey. And just don't forget to come."
"I'll come, Steve. You know I'll come. Just as soon as everything's settled."
"Sure, honey, I know. But it'll be a long time. A long, long time. Can't you tell a guy good-by?"
So they said good-by in a way he thought would last him through all the time of waiting, and then he took the bag she'd packed for him and went back down to the barn. He scattered some kerosene around, putting quite a bit on the drifter's body, and then lit a lantern. He smashed the lantern on the planking where the body had struck and let it fall. Flames leaped up like spits of hell. He went out to the back side of the barn and ran with long, regular strides down the cowpath to the pasture. Behind him, he could hear old Reuben raising hell, could hear the crashing of his hooves against the stall.
He ran through the pasture to the creek, and, walking then, he followed the creek a couple of miles to a three-lane highway. He caught a ride on a pickup truck into the city, and next day he caught a bus to another city, and not long after that he caught a boat to another country, and so here he was, one year, six weeks and three days later, sitting in a bar with a daiquiri in his hands and Ella upstairs and the long wait almost over.
In about half an hour, she came. He could see her enter the room behind him, growing larger in the mirror, and she crawled onto a stool with one empty between them. She ordered a daiquiri of her own, and he watched her from the corners of his eyes, all the details once more sharp and clear that had been blurred by waiting too long on a beach, the sleepy eyes and red, sulky mouth, the body that even touching hardly made credible, the long twin sheens of nylon crossed at the knees. He thought of the way they'd said good-by, and he began to think that it was time to say hello, and as he sat there thinking about it, his pulse accelerated, and his heart knocked painfully at his ribs.
After a while, a guy angling for a pickup, he turned on his stool and said, “May I buy you a drink?"
She glanced at him and smiled a little and shrugged her shoulders. “Why not?"
He shifted over onto the intervening empty and told the bartender
two more daiquiris. Understanding that business was going forward, the
bartender supplied them quickly and faded. He was a good bartender. A guy sensitive to a situation.
"It's been a long time,” Steve said softly. “I thought you were never coming."
"I almost missed you on the pier, darling. The beard makes you look older."
"How did it go?"
"There was a hassle. An investigation. They thought it was funny, a guy walking in behind a vicious horse like that. They paid off, though. Double. Fifty grand."
"Where's the money?"
"Upstairs, darling. Hidden in my baggage in a way it could never be noticed. Up there waiting for us, like we've been waiting for each other. When the three of us get together, that's when we start living."
"That's now, baby. There's you and me and the money and nothing left between us."
She lifted the daiquiri to her lips and her eyes to the mirror, and it was then he got the feel of something wrong. An unease in her manner, an uncertainty in her voice. A last remnant of left-over fear.
"I'm worried,” she said. “I'm worried to hell."
"What's the matter?"
She lowered her glass to the bar and sat looking down into it, twisting it slowly by the stem between the scarlet tips of her fingers. “A man. He came down on the boat with me. I'm positive he's an insurance dick."
"You mean he's following you?"
"Yes."
"What makes you think he's a dick?"
"I saw him once before. I'm sure he's the one. There was another dick out to the farm on the investigation. Later, in town, I happened to see him with this guy who came down on the boat. They were having some beers in a bar. I followed them when they left, and they went to the offices of the insurance company. I know damn well he's a dick, Steve. I'll swear he's the same guy."
"What's he look like?"
"Look in the mirror, you can see for yourself. He's at a table behind us. Tall. Black hair. Wearing a white suit."
Steve lifted his eyes and sorted the dick out. He was concentrating on his drink, something in a tall glass with a peel curled over the edge, but Steve had the strange feeling that he was a guy trying too hard not to look at someone he wanted like hell to look at. A handsome guy. A tall, smooth, easy-to-look-at guy. Inside, Steve felt shrunken and icy cold, deadly with the pointed, purposeful deadliness of someone who's waited too long.
"He shouldn't have followed you,” he said. “He never should have come."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll have to kill him, of course. I'll kill him fast, and we'll move out of here."
"No!” Her whisper possessed a desperate urgency. “No, Steve!"
"Why not? We killed once. This time it'll be easier."
"That's just the point. Each time it'll be easier. We can't go on killing forever."
"Who said forever? Just twice. After this one, nobody'll ever find us."
"Look, Steve. There's another way. A better way. Give me a chance to convince you."
"When?"
"Tonight. Just as soon as I can get to you after dark."
He thought about the two of them on the dark beach after so long a time, and again his pulse was an acute and throbbing pain. “Can you shake the dick?"
"Leave it to me."
"Okay. I've got a shack down the beach. There's
an outcropping of rock, jutting into the sea. The shack's the first one beyond it."
"I'll be there, darling. Wait for me. Wait just a little bit longer."
"Okay. For you and the money. Don't forget to bring it with you."
"I'll bring it."
He slipped off the stool and smiled at her like a guy who'd invested a drink in a project he intended to finish later. Without looking at the black-haired man in the white suit, he went out of the bar and the hotel and back down the beach beyond the outcropping of rock to the shack. He lay on his back in the sand with one arm bent up over his eyes to reinforce the thin, inadequate defense of his lids against the glaring white light, and all the tension that had mounted within him during the past half year seemed to dissolve and disappear, leaving his body relaxed and his mind functioning with a kind of dispassionate clarity. He lay without moving for a long time, until at last he became aware of a sudden chill in the air, and he opened his eyes to see the sun plunging into the sea. Almost before he could get up and go into the shack, the black, obliterating night had fallen with incredible suddenness and silence.
Inside the shack, he lit an oil lamp, turning the wick low. From his bag under the cot he slept on, he got a .38 revolver. He slipped the revolver under his belt, beneath the loose tail of his shirt, and sat down on the cot to wait some more. From his position, he could look through the open door of the shack and down across the beach at an angle to the mass of rock lapped by the sea. Once, after about half an hour, he got up and found a bottle and took a long pull from the neck. Then he resumed his seat on the cot and didn't move again until, such a long time later that he'd become unable even to estimate the time, he saw Ella coming up across the sand from the rocks in the first light of the moon.
He stood up to meet her, and regret twisted within him like a sharp knife that there would be no time to say hello as they had said good-by. She came in through the door and into his arms, and the weight of her body against his pressed the .38 into his flesh until it felt like a belly cramp.
She felt the steel in her own flesh and arched back in his arms. “A gun, Steve? Why?"
AHMM, April 2009 Page 14